Yesterday I witnessed a dysfunctional family in their full glory. We have a neighbor who is both deaf and mentally challenged. I do not know how I would handle the rearing of such a child, and I am not passing judgment. I will say that she was never taught sign language nor was she schooled in observing the social boundaries that so many people with her disabilities find difficult to comprehend.
As a result, she is an extremely unpleasant person to be around. She’s in her early 40s, and her parents do everything for her. She should not be attempting to live alone. This arrangement only came about when she threw a temper tantrum in the wake of her parents buying a home for her sister as a wedding gift.
At any rate, she is so spoiled, that when something does not go her way, she throws a fit until her father gets her what she wants. He has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. Her mother survived breast cancer last year. The fragile support structure that buoys up her questionable independence will not be able to hold much longer.
My phone rang about 7:30. It was the father, demanding to know what I had done to knock out his daughter’s cable. We are having a significant issue with the property’s backyard lighting, and I had shown a workman where key wires were buried. Apparently in the process, her cable line was nicked. But here’s the statement that drew me up short.
“You have to do something about this so she’ll stop calling over here and driving me crazy.”
There are so many things wrong with that, I don’t even begin to know where to start. Essentially, he and his wife created a monster and now, as their health is declining, they are dealing with the consequences of that creation.
Throughout the remainder of the day this man, less than two weeks after major surgery, was over here at least half a dozen times, at one point attempting to find the cut line himself. He apparently paid the cable company for an “emergency” repair, which he supervised at 7 o’clock last night by spotlight.
And, he could not resist the pleasure of calling the president of the homeowner’s association to report my guilt in the whole matter. As I’ve said in other venues, my hands never touched that shovel. I saw the wire come out of the ground, and I still find it difficult to believe it was damaged in the process.
For once, the HOA president was completely on my side and pointed out a pattern on the part of this whole family of shifting the blame for any and everything off their own shoulders and on to those of the nearest convenient recipient. They also expect everyone to coddle their daughter and dance to her tune as they have done for lo these many years.
At the end of the day, a sick man exhausted himself, the cable company made a tidy profit, blame was rightfully or wrongly dispensed, and the daughter learned nothing. In fact, her inappropriate behavior was only reinforced. When I looked her straight in the eye mid-afternoon and told her I did not have time to listen to her ravings, the expression on her face was one of complete incomprehension.
Clearly she is accustomed to taking center stage with her fits and having people jump to make her world right again. When something does happen to one or both of her folks, her world will come crashing down with an impact even greater than that experienced by any of us who have lost a parent.
It was ironic that this was the same day the world listened to Tiger Woods explain his all-to-late realization that the rules do still apply for him. He represents the other end of the spectrum. Neither great gifts nor deficits rewrite the basic rules of human interaction. The mechanics of life may differ, but decency and good manners remain the same.
I won’t lie. My own emotions throughout the day ran the gamut from annoyed to purely angry. But as the day closed, the most overwhelming reaction I had for the entire family was frankly one of pity. Some genies cannot be put back in the bottle and some spirits, for want of a restraining hand, cannot be repaired.